Music to Your Ears: The quest for 3-D recording and other mysteries of sound.

DC

"Manhattan Boy"
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In his article "Music to Your Ears" (The New Yorker, Jan 28, 2012, pp. 32-39), Adam Gopnik describes the research and innovations of Edgar Choueiri, a Princeton rocket scientist who more than dabbles in the way the human brain receives sound, specifically stereo recorded music, and turns that sound into meaning.

I think you have to be a paid subscriber to read the article (I receive the print version so I can view it digitally as well), but you can read the abstract here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_gopnik

I think it paradoxically answers the "Is it real or is it in your head?" question by arguing that what is in our head is actually real.
 
I've pasted the abstract here, which I hope doesn't violate any copyright laws. :para:

ABSTRACT: ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about Edgar Choueiri and three-dimensional recording. Of all the amazing things the mind does, the most amazing may be that it can take sound and turn it into music, and then take music and turn it into meaning. Edgar Choueiri, a rocket scientist at Princeton, has a laboratory the size of a small airplane hangar, and it is filled with plasma rocket engines that run on electricity. In his smaller lab, adjacent to the rocket one, Choueiri, the president of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, works on his musical projects, trying to force three-dimensional sound from ordinary stereo speakers. By three-dimensional sound he does not mean wraparound sound. In Choueiri’s system, when you listen to choral music by his hero, Bach, you will hear it coming not from speakers but as if from performers in the room itself. Outside his smaller lab is an office whose shelves are filled with those strange white dummy heads which sound scientists love. Choueiri plugged in his box, which runs what he calls his BACCH filter—the acronym also stands for “Band-Assembled Crosstalk Cancellation Hierarchy—and Bluetoothed it to the writer’s iPhone. The writer chose the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden,” and there they were. Keith Richards was limping over to his left, licking at chords, and Ronnie Wood to the right. Choueiri belongs to a distinctly modern type: the engineer-aesthete. The creation of three-dimensional sound depends on each ear’s hearing only what it’s supposed to hear. The catch with previous attempts at crosstalk cancellation, or “XTC,” is that the sound coloration is extremely sensitive to small changes in position. Choueiri has discovered a way to feed more error into the designs of the XTC than anyone had previously imagined possible, so that the signal will never discolor. The sound of all stereo-era recordings can easily become three-dimensional, because they were all recorded with at least two microphones. Perhaps the densest concentration of sound scholars in the world can be found in Montreal, at McGill University, where the writer went to school. Albert Bregman, a former professor of the writer’s, spent almost fifty years at McGill studying the psychology of sound, and his masterwork, “Auditory Sense Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound,” remains a basic text in the field. Discusses Bregman’s suggestion that music is essentially a form of what he dubbed “chimerical perception.” Mentions Robert Zatorre, Daniel Levitin, and Jonathan Sterne.

Adam Gopnik, Onward and Upward with the Arts, “Music to Your Ears,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2013, p. 32

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/28/130128fa_fact_gopnik#ixzz2IwjT3B17
 
Interesting, I just posted in the General Audio Discussion forum regarding this article.
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=497619

The first half is about Choueiri's work which I've been following, but the second half really expands the context around sound and the experience of music itself. I found the article very thought provoking, particularly the conclusion which reflects Adam Gopnik's insight into the subject at hand.

It's a subscriber-only article.
 
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